Google Art

I’m not giving up on the necklace a day project but I am a lot behind and what I’ve done I haven’t had good daylight to take pictures of, so. Expect a deluge of posts about that when the rain is gone. Or something.

In the meantime, do you know about the Google Art Project??? It’s been around for awhile but I just ran across it this weekend and oh. my. gosh. Virtual tours of museums all over, with the ability to blow up sections of the piece and wow. It’s not exactly like being there but it’s the best iteration of real-life art I’ve seen online to date. Here are a couple screenshots of just a few of the pieces over there. Seriously. Go check it out.

You can click the images below for bigger versions if you want to see more detail.

“Birth of Venus” is so huge. I don’t remember ever not knowing what it was or not getting all the references to it that are made everywhere, all the time. But if you’d asked me to sketch what I thought it was, it’d be just a woman standing in a big clamshell. Who knew there were other people there?

Dude. Napoleon is so hot.

Sometimes seeing paintings in the flesh is surprising. Like the size—I always assume painting are going to be about poster size, but a lot of them aren’t. Some of them are really small, like Dali’s “Persistence of Memory”, which is intricately fit onto a canvas about the size of an 8×10. Sometimes the texture is shocking. Van Gogh uses a boatload of paint.